After many obstacles, a huge solar-based power plant has come on line in California. It consists of a field of 300 thousand mirrors, all aimed to reflect sunlight on the top of a tower, thus heating up a steam generator. It produces 390 megawatts, enough for 140 thousand houses, saving 72 thousand cars' worth of CO2.

So the Polar Vortex fell on us, followed by Winter Storms Rex, Tyrannosaur, Godzilla, and Antichrist. That was just us, here in North America. This has been a warm January, averaging over the whole world—the fourth warmest on record.

There are some amazing tricks played down there in the DNA. Some genes can be read forward or backward, coding for different proteins each way. In other instances, you can shift the code one nucleotide over and still have a useable protein, like striking a letter off a sentence and getting new meaningful sentence. Now, they've found a new trick: Take the first codon is each of a series of genes and you have information about how to express the genes.

The physics of the small and of the large meet often, these days. Dutch astronomers have been observing the X-ray spectra of some distant galaxies and have found an odd line they cannot explain by any known atomic activity. But it might be from the activity of a new kind of neutrino, a "sterile neutrino," so called because it does not interact because it does not interact with other neutrinos. (There are three known kinds of neutrino, which turn into each other.) Sterile neutrinos would be good candidates for the mysterious "dark matter" that out-weighs all the normal matter in the universe, but which remains of unknown composition.

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Earl Wajenberg (pronounced WY-en-berg, contact him) is a professional writer. He has masters degrees in physics and the history and philosophy of science. Science has been a lifelong fascination for him.